 | The Women of Tomorrow |  |
IV
LAST month's article ended with the inquiry whether the new education for homemaking would clash seriously with the modern young woman's necessary education for money-earning. We conclude that it will not.
Such developments as the long, specialized, four-year course in Household Economics at Simmons College in Boston are not here in point. That Simmons course is more than an education for home-making. It is an education for earning money by teaching home-making or by becoming (among other things) a dietitian in a hospital, or a manager of a lunch-room, or an interior decorator.
Our subject is not Home Economics as a money-earning occupation for a few women, but Home Economics as part of the education of all women.
In that aspect it does not seem likely to result in any "special feminine education" of such bulk as to withdraw women, in any serious degree, from the general education of the race. This is undeniably true, provided our observations have been correct that—
1. Home Economics is at heart Consumption, and must be so because the home woman is more and more purely a consumer.
2. Consumption is the broadest of generalities, requiring the broadest of liberal educations.
3. So far as manual arts are concerned, the "non-academic" cookery of the girl is balanced by the "non-academic" carpentry of the boy.
4. Right Living and Wise Spending will, to a great extent, get diffused throughout the whole educational system for boys and girls, men and women, alike.
If there remains (and there does remain) certain further specialization which the average girl needs in order to be a good wife, mother, and home-maker, she will get it in "finishing courses" furnished at the various levels of the educational system, when she leaves school, or else (better still) she will get it in "continuation schools" for adults to which she may resort when she is actually going to be a wife, mother, or home-maker.
Why learn really technical specialized things years and years before they are needed? Why learn them at a time when it is not certain that they will be needed at all?
The modern postponement of marriage is here a controlling element.
The fact that in Boston, among women from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 297 out of every 1,000 (more than a quarter) are still unmarried is usually put down to a scarcity of men. That scarcity is exaggerated.
Observe the comparative numbers of unmarried women and of unmarried men in that age-period in Boston:
| Unmarried Women | 8,081 |
| Unmarried Men | 10,651. |
Observe further:
The total number of men of all conjugal conditions in the age-period in question is 28,603.
A little work with pencil and paper will now still further weaken the scarcity theory by revealing the fact that in Boston, among men from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 372 out of every 1,000 are still single.
Social conditions in rural communities tend to approach those of urban communities. Social conditions in the West tend to approach those in the East. Boston is not eccentric. It is only ahead.
"Continuation School" instruction in Home Economics for engaged and married women is a form of education beginning to appear in every part of the world.
But it lies beyond the woman's period of money-earning. How long is that period? And what are the social and racial consequences of the fact that (speaking generally) the more highly prepared modern men and women are to transmit intelligence to posterity, the more steadily do they tend to give their most vigorous years to singleness?
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